Read The Little Paris Bookshop Online
Authors: Nina George
The Little Paris Bookshop (13 page)
The lock-keeper impatiently beckoned them forward. His dog planted its legs wide and snarled at the boat; meanwhile, the lock-keeper’s wife brought out some freshly baked plum tart and let them keep the plate in return for the latest John Irving.
‘And a kiss from the young writer there.’
‘Give her another book, Perdu, I beg you,’ Jordan hissed. ‘That woman’s got a beard.’
She insisted on a peck on the cheek.
The lock-keeper called his wife an ogress while their shaggy blond dog barked himself hoarse and peed on Max’s hand as he held on to the ladder. In return, the exasperated lock-keeper’s wife berated her husband for being a show-off and an amateur janitor. He irritably shouted, ‘Bring her in!’
Wind the left lock gate shut, walk around, wind the right lock gate shut. Walk forward, open the upper lock barriers on both sides – water runs in. Open the right lock gate, walk around, open the top left one.
‘Take her out now!’ The lock-keeper was stern and could probably bark this order in twelve different languages.
‘How many locks left before the Rhône?’
‘About a hundred and fifty. Why do you want to know, Jordan?’
‘We should take the canal between Champagne and Burgundy on the way back.’
Way back?
thought Perdu.
There is no way back.
The Loing Canal ran level with the surrounding countryside. They saw the occasional single-minded cyclist, dozing angler or lonely jogger on the towpath. Meadows where sturdy white Charolais cattle grazed and fields of sunflowers alternated with lush woodland. Sometimes a car driver would give them a friendly honk of his horn. The small villages they passed had good moorings, many of them free of charge and vying for boats to tie up so that the crew would spend their money in the local shops.
Then the landscape changed. The canal was higher now, and they could look down into people’s gardens.
By the time they had entered the Champagne region with its many fisheries, Max was operating the locks almost like an old pro. An increasing number of side channels flowed off from the canal into lakes. Gulls rose shrieking from patches of reeds and clumps of bulrushes and wheeled inquisitively over the waterborne
Literary Apothecary.
‘What’s the next major mooring place?’ asked Perdu.
‘Montargis. The canal flows right through the town centre.’ Max flicked through the houseboating book. ‘The flower-filled town where pralines were invented. We should look for a bank there. I’d kill for a piece of chocolate.’
And I’d do the same for some detergent and a fresh shirt.
Max had washed their shirts with liquid hand soap, so they both smelled of rose potpourri.
Then a thought struck Perdu. ‘Montargis? We should pay a visit to P. D. Olson first.’
‘Olson?
The
P. D. Olson? Do you know him too?’
‘Know’ was too strong a word. Jean Perdu had been a young bookseller when Per David Olson was being talked about as a potential Nobel laureate for literature – along with Philip Roth and Alice Munro.
How old would Olson be now? Eighty-two? He’d moved to France thirty years ago.
La grande nation
appealed to this descendant of a Viking clan a lot more than his American homeland did.
‘A nation that has less than a thousand years of culture to look back on, no myths, no superstition, no collective memories, values or sense of shame; nothing but pseudo-Christian warrior morals, deviant wheat, an amoral arms lobby, and rampant sexist racism’ – those were the words of a
New York Times
article in which he had laid into the United States before leaving the country.
However, the most interesting thing about P. D. Olson was that his was one of eleven names on Jean Perdu’s list of possible authors of Sanary’s
Southern Lights
. And P.D. lived in Cepoy, a village on the canal just this side of Montargis.
‘So what do we do? Ring his doorbell and say, “Hi, P.D., old buddy, did you write
Southern Lights
?”’
‘Exactly. What else?’
Max puffed out his cheeks. ‘Well, any normal person would write an email,’ he said.
Jean Perdu had to restrain himself from making a remark that smacked of ‘we had to walk to school uphill both ways, and things were still better than now.’
In place of a harbour, Cepoy had two large iron rings in the grass, through which they pulled the
Literary Apothecary
’s ropes taut.
Soon afterwards the owner of the waterside youth hostel – a sunburned man with a red bulge on the back of his neck – directed them to the old rectory where P. D. Olson lived.
They knocked on the door, and it was opened by a woman straight out of a Pieter Bruegel painting. A flat face, hair like coarse flax on the spindle, a white lace collar on a plain grey smock. She said neither ‘Hello’ nor ‘What do you want?’ nor even ‘We don’t buy from door-to-door salesmen’; she simply opened the door and waited in silence – a silence as hard as stone.
‘
Bonjour, Madame
. We’d like to see Monsieur Olson,’ said Perdu after a pause.
‘He doesn’t know we’re coming,’ added Max.
‘We’ve come by boat from Paris. Unfortunately, we don’t have a phone.’
‘Or any money.’
Perdu elbowed Max in the ribs. ‘But that’s not why we’ve come.’
‘Is he at home?’
‘I’m a bookseller and we met at a book fair once. In Frankfurt, in 1985.’
‘I’m an interpreter of dreams. And an author. Max Jordan. Pleased to meet you. You wouldn’t have any leftovers from yesterday’s casserole? All we have on our boat is a tin of white beans and some Whiskas.’
‘Plead all you like, gentlemen, but there’ll be no forgiveness and no casserole,’ they heard a voice say. ‘Margareta has been deaf since her fiancé threw himself off a church tower. She tried to save him and got caught up in the midday bell ringing. She lip-reads only with people she knows. Damn church! Heaps misery on any who haven’t already given up hope.’
Before them stood the notorious critic of America: P. D. Olson, a stunted Viking in a pair of rough cord trousers, a collarless shirt and a stripy waistcoat.
‘Monsieur Olson, we do apologise for ambushing you like this, but we have an urgent question we—’
‘Yes, yes. Of course, everything’s urgent in Paris, but it’s not the same here, gentlemen. Here time cuts its own cloth. Here the enemies of mankind toil in vain. Let’s have a little drink and make acquaintances first,’ he said, inviting in his two visitors.
‘The enemies of mankind?’ Max said under his breath. He was obviously concerned that they might have run into a madman.
‘You’re regarded as a legend,’ he tried by way of conversation when Olson had taken a hat from the coat-rack and they were striding along beside him towards the
bar tabac
.
‘Don’t call me a legend, young man. It makes me sound like a corpse.’
Max said nothing, and Jean Perdu decided to follow his example.
As Olson preceded them through the village, his gait betraying a stroke sometime in the past, he said, ‘Look around! People here have been fighting for their homeland for centuries! Over there – do you see how the trees have been planted and the roofs tiled? See how the main roads give the village a wide berth? All part of a strategy that was centuries in the making. Nobody here thinks of the present.’
He greeted a man who came clattering past in a Renault with a goat in the passenger seat.
‘Here they work and think for the future, always for those who will come after them. And then their descendants do the same. This land will be destroyed only if one generation stops thinking of the next and tries to change everything now.’
They reached the
bar tabac
. Inside, a TV over the bar was showing a horse race. Olson ordered three small glasses of red wine.
‘A bet, the backwoods and a little booze. What more does a man need?’ he said with pleasure.
‘Anyway, we’ve got a question—’ Max began.
‘Easy, son,’ said Olson. ‘You smell of potpourri and look like a DJ with those earmuffs on. But I know you – you’ve written something. Dangerous truths. Not a bad start.’ He clinked glasses with Jordan.
Max glowed with pride. Perdu felt a stab of jealousy.
‘And you? Are you the literary apothecary?’ Olson said, turning to him. ‘What ailments do you prescribe my books for?’
‘For retired husband syndrome,’ Perdu answered, more pointedly than he had intended.
Olson stared at him. ‘Aha. And how does that work?’
‘When, after his retirement, a husband gets under a woman’s feet so much that she feels like killing him, she can read your books and she’ll feel like killing you instead. Your books are lightning conductors.’
Max looked perplexed. Olson pinned Perdu with his gaze – and erupted into gales of laughter.
‘God, that brings it all back! My father was always getting in my mother’s way and criticising her. Why do you have to peel the potatoes before cooking them? Welcome home, dear, I’ve done a little tidying in the fridge. Terrible. He’d been a workaholic and didn’t have any hobbies. Fairly soon the boredom and lost dignity made him want to die, but my mum wouldn’t let him. She kept sending him out with the grandchildren, to DIY courses and into the garden. I think she’d have ended up in jail for murder.’ Olson chuckled. ‘We men become a pain if our job’s the only thing we were ever good at.’ He drained his wine in three long swigs.
‘Okay, drink up,’ he said, leaving six euros on the counter. ‘We’re off.’
And because they hoped he would answer their question once he’d had a chance to listen, they, too, knocked back their wine and followed P.D. outside.
In a few minutes they reached the old schoolhouse. The playground was full of cars with registration numbers from all over the Loire region and from as far afield as Orléans and Chartres.
Olson marched purposefully towards the sports hall.
They entered and suddenly found themselves in central Buenos Aires.
Along the left-hand wall: the men. On the chairs to the right: the women. In the centre: the dance floor. At the front, where the climbing rings hung: a tango band. At the end where they were standing: a bar, behind which a short, very rotund man with bulging biceps and a bushy black moustache was serving drinks.
P. D. Olson turned and called over his shoulder, ‘Dance! Both of you. Afterwards I’ll answer whatever questions you like.’
A few seconds later, as the old man strode confidently across the dance floor towards a young woman with a severe ponytail and a slit skirt, he was utterly transformed into a lithe, ageless
tanguero
who pressed the young woman tightly to him and guided her gracefully around the hall.
While Max gawked at this unsuspected world, Monsieur Perdu grasped right away where he was. He had read about places like this in a book by Jac. Toes: secret tango
milongas
in school halls, gymnasiums or deserted barns. There dancers of all levels and ages and every nationality would meet up; some would drive hundreds of miles to savour these few hours. One thing united them: they had to keep their passion for the tango a secret from jealous partners and families who greeted these depraved, suggestive, frivolous moves with disgust and rigid, pinch-mouthed embarrassment. No one had a clue where the
tangueras
were at this time of the afternoon. They thought they were playing sport or attending a course, at a meeting or at the shops, in the sauna, out in the fields or at home. Yet they were dancing for their lives; they were dancing for life itself.
Few did it to meet their mistresses or lovers, for tango was not about that: it was about everything.
On the Way to Bonnieux
11 April 1987
For eight months I’ve known that I’m a very different woman from the girl who came to the north last August and was so scared that I wouldn’t be capable of loving – twice.
It still comes as a huge shock to me to discover that love doesn’t need to be restricted to one person to be true.
In May I’ll marry Luc, beneath a thousand blossoms and amid the sweet scent that a new beginning and confidence bring.
I shall not break up with Jean; I shall, however, leave it up to him whether he does so with me, the voracious want-it-all.
Am I so terrified of transience that I need to experience everything immediately, just in case I’m struck down tomorrow?
Marriage. Yes? No? To question that would be to call everything into question.
I wish I were the light in Provence when the sun goes down. Then I could be everywhere, in every living thing. It would be who I am, and no one would hate me for it.
I must arrange my face before I arrive in Avignon. I hope it’s Papa picking me up, not Luc, not Maman. Whenever I spend time in Paris, my features seek to adapt to the expressions urban creatures wear as they jostle past each other in the streets, as though oblivious to the fact that they’re not alone. They are faces that say: ‘Me? I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything. Nothing impresses me, nothing shocks me, surprises or even pleases me. Pleasure is for simpletons from the suburbs and from stinking cowsheds. They can be pleased. The likes of us have more important matters to attend to.’
But it’s not my indifferent face that’s the problem; it’s my ninth face.
Maman says I’ve added it to my other ones. She has known my every gesture and facial expression since I entered this world as a wrinkly little grub. But Paris has transformed my face from my hair parting to the tip of my chin. She must have noticed the last time I came home, while I was thinking of Jean, his mouth, his laugh, his ‘you’ve got to read this, it’ll do you good’.
‘I’d be scared to have you for a rival,’ she said. She was stunned that she’d blurted it out.
We’ve always dealt with truths in that direct, clear way. I learned as a girl that the best type of relationship was ‘clear as mountain water’. I was taught that difficult thoughts lost their poison when spoken aloud.
I don’t think that’s always true.
My ‘ninth face’ unsettles Maman. I know what she means. I’ve seen it in Jean’s mirror as he rubbed my back with a warm towel. Every time we see each other he takes a part of me out and warms it up so I don’t wither like a frost-damaged lemon tree. He would be a father hen. My new face is sensual, but it hides behind a mask of self-control, which only makes it seem spookier to Maman.
Maman’s still anxious for me. Her anxiety is practically infectious, and I think that should something happen to me, I want to have lived as intensely as possible up to that point, and I don’t want to hear anyone complain.
She asks little, and I tell a lot – I give virtually a blow-by-blow account of my weeks in the capital and I hide Jean behind a beaded curtain of tinkling, brightly coloured, transparent minutiae, detail upon detail. Clear as mountain water.
‘Paris has taken you further from us and closer to yourself, hasn’t it?’ says Maman, and when she says ‘Paris’, she knows I know she’s got a man’s name in mind, but I’m not prepared to tell her.
I never will be.
I am so foreign to myself. It’s as if Jean had peeled back a shell to reveal a deeper, truer self who is reaching out to me with a mocking grin.
‘So?’ it says. ‘Did you really think you were a woman without qualities?’ (Jean says that quoting Musil’s
The Man Without
Qualities
is not a sign of intelligence, merely of a well-trained memory.)
But what exactly is happening to us?
This damned freedom! It means I have to be as silent as a tree stump about what I am up to while my family and Luc mistakenly imagine me in a seminar at the Sorbonne or working hard in the evenings. It means I have to control myself, destroy and hide myself in Bonnieux, and not expect anyone to take my confession or listen to the truth of my secret life.
I feel as if I’m sitting on top of Mount Ventoux, exposed to the sun, the rain and the horizon. I can see further and breathe more freely than ever before; but I am stripped of my defences. To be free is to lose one’s certainty, says Jean.
But do I really know what I’m losing?
And do I really know what he’s giving up by choosing me? He says he wants no other woman but me. It’s enough that I’m leading two lives; he didn’t want to do the same. Each time he makes things easy for me I could weep with gratitude. Never a reproach, barely a tricky question; he makes me feel that I’m a gift, not simply a bad person who makes too many demands on life.
If I confided in someone back home, he or she would be forced to lie with me and keep it secret and silent. I need to make it difficult for myself, not for others: those are the rules for the fallen.
Not once have I mentioned Jean’s name. I’m worried that the way I say it could allow Maman, Papa or Luc to see straight through me.
Maybe each of them in their own way would show understanding. Maman, because she knows a woman’s longings. They are there in all of us, even as small girls when we can hardly see over the table in the corner of the kitchen, and spend our time chatting to our long-suffering soft toys and wise ponies.
Papa, because he knows the animal lust that lurks inside us, would understand the wild, nourishing side to my behaviour; perhaps he would even recognise the biological instinct – like a potato’s urge to germinate. (I’ll ask him for help if I don’t know what to do. Or Mamapapa, as Sanary wrote in a book that Jean read aloud to me.)
Luc would understand because he knows me, because it was his decision to stay with me even knowing I needed more. He always
stands by his decisions: what’s right is right, even if it hurts or later turns out to be wrong.
But what happens if I tell him about Jean, and thirty years from now he admits how badly I hurt him when I couldn’t keep my mouth shut?
I know my future husband – he would spend many horrible hours and nights. He would look at me and see the other man over my shoulder. He would sleep with me and think: Is she thinking of him? Is it good, is it better with him? Whenever I talked to a man at the village fete or the Bastille Day procession, would he wonder: Is he the next one? When will she finally be satisfied? He would come to terms with it all on his own and wouldn’t breathe a word of reproach to me. What was it he said? ‘This is the only life we have. I want to spend mine with you, but without impeding yours.’
For Luc’s sake too I must keep my mouth shut.
And for my sake – I want Jean all to myself.
I hate wanting all of this – it’s more than I bargained for …
Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.
How I will enjoy looking back on all our experiences when I am old and can no longer touch my toes!
Those nights when we lay in the grass in the fort at Buoux, searching the stars. Those weeks when we turned wild in the Camargue. Oh, and those fabulous evenings when Jean introduced me to a life with books as we sprawled naked on the divan with Castor the cat, and Jean used my backside as a book rest. I didn’t know there was such an infinite number of thoughts and marvels, and so much knowledge to be had. The world’s rulers should be forced to take a reader’s licence. Only when they have read five thousand – no, make that ten thousand – books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave. I often felt better, no longer so bad, fake and unfaithful, when Jean read me bits where good people did nasty things out of love or necessity or their hunger for life.
‘Did you think you were the only one, Manon?’ he asked – and yes, it really did feel that awful, as if I were the only one unable to rein in my appetite.
Often when we’ve finished making love and haven’t yet started again, Jean tells me about a book that he’s read, wants to read or wants me to read. He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use.
Leniency. Kindness. Contradiction. Forbearance.
He knows so much; he is a man who knows what it means to love selflessly. He lives when he loves. His confidence falters when he’s loved. Is that why he feels so awkward? He has no idea what is where in his body! Grief, anxiety, laughter – where does it all come from? I’d press my fist into his tummy: ‘Do your butterflies live here?’ I’d blow under his belly button: ‘Virility there?’ I’d put my fingers to his neck: ‘Tears here?’ His body can be frozen, paralysed.
One evening we went out dancing.
Tango argentino
. A disaster! Jean was embarrassed and shunted me around, a little this way and a little that, practising the steps he’d learned in dance classes, but only using his hands. He was there, but he was not in control of his own body.
Impossible – not him, not this man! He wasn’t like men from the north, from Picardy, Normandy or Lorraine, who suffer from a great sterility of the soul, though there are many women in Paris who find that erotic – as if it were a sexual challenge to elicit the tiniest of emotions from a man! That kind of woman imagines that somewhere within this coldness is a blazing passion that will spur him on to throw her over his shoulder and pin her to the floor. We had to break off. We went home, had a drink and tiptoed round the truth. He was exceptionally tender as, naked, we played like a tom and his puss. My despair knew no bounds. If I couldn’t dance with him, then what?
I am my body. My pussy glistens when I feel desire, my chest perspires when I’m humiliated, and my fingers tingle with fear of my own courage; they quiver when I’m primed to protect and defend. When I ought to be afraid of real things, though – like the knot they found in my armpit and want to remove with a biopsy – I feel both bewildered and calm. My bewilderment makes me want to keep busy; but I’m calm, so calm that I don’t wish to read serious books or listen to grand, sweeping music. All I want to do is sit here and watch the trickle of autumn light onto the red-golden leaves; I want to clean the fireplace; I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting
thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep – the soul’s refuge from panic.
But what about him? When Jean dances, his body is a clothes stand with a shirt, trousers and a jacket hanging from it.
I stood up, he followed me, I slapped him.
A burning in my hand, a fire as though I’d reached into the embers.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s that for?’
I slapped him again; I had hot coals in my fingers now.
‘Stop thinking! Feel!’ I screamed at him.
I went over to the record player and put the ‘Libertango’ on for us. Accordion playing like the lashing of a whip, like blows from a riding crop or the crackling of branches in the fire. Piazzolla, driving the violins up into the heights.
‘No, I
—’
‘Yes. Dance with me. Dance the way you feel! How do you feel?’
‘I’m furious! You hit me, Manon!’
‘Then dance furiously! Find the instrument in the piece that reflects your emotions and follow it! Grab me with the fury you feel for me!’
No sooner had I spoken these words than he seized me and pushed me up against the wall with both arms above my head, his grip firm, very firm. The violins wailed. We danced naked; he had chosen the violin as the instrument of his emotions. His rage turned to desire, then to tenderness, and when I bit and scratched him, resisted his lead and refused to take his hand – my lover became a
tanguero
. He returned to his body.
While I leaned against him, heart to heart, and he was making me feel what he felt for me, I saw our shadows dancing across the wall, across the walls of the Lavender Room. They were dancing in the window frame, they were dancing as one, and Castor the tomcat observed us and our shadows from the top of the wardrobe.
From that evening on we always danced tango – naked at first because it made the swaying and the coaxing and the holding easier. We danced, our hands on our own hearts. And then at some point we switched and laid our hand on the other’s heart.
Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they
can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.